The COVID crisis meant that the Free University of Brighton moved online during the Summer term and I was teaching a philosophy course on Existentialism, mainly focused on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, followed by a close look at Sartre’s account of pre-reflective consciousness in Transcendence of the Ego, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions and his chapter on Bad Faith in Being and Nothingness.
I decided, after some research into options, to host lectures on Twitch and then do seminars via Zoom. I’ve added a new page to the blog that explains how the stream works, which you can check out here.
The aim was to keep the class ‘open’ in some ways, as one of the great joys of FUB is that we have a very open class structure. Often I find that FUB courses have a core set of students for the class, alongside another section of people who attend more loosely, usually because of time. The open, almost ‘drop-in’ nature of classes is important as it shifts the dynamics in the space – the class isn’t closed in on itself, producing a kind of insularity to conversation, rather the fact that there might be a more random element forces discussions to be alert to assumptions because someone who is following more loosely might need things to be explained differently. I’ve also been interested in the shifts in the Twitch and streaming community, with a large increase in recent years in the ‘Just Chatting’ category, and so it offered an interesting space to experiment with ‘doing philosophy in public’.
I’m still pretty new to that whole Twitch/YouTube streaming space but the class seemed to go well. The lecture streams get automatically recorded on Twitch and then easily exported to YouTube, and you can check out the Existentialism class playlist over at Twitch or on YouTube. One thing I ended up doing was using some specific software, getting to know the tech behind streaming and getting a decent (ish) mic, as there’s nothing worse than poor sound in a lecture type space.
As I mention during the last lecture session (lecture 9), I’m intending to carry on doing a Monday evening stream, the idea being to report on that weeks philosophical research, sometimes chat to others and sometimes to go through specific short texts or sections of text. Monday evenings from about 7pm – if you follow the Twitch channel you can get notified when I go online.
This week I’m hoping to start the ‘weekly research seminar’ sessions by talking to Eric about the ‘Freudian Spaceship’ project we’ve been working on for a few years, where we’re developing a Fanonian Schizoanalysis. One of the things I want to chat about is the role of dreams and dreaming, which I’d rather use as a concept than ‘ideology’ or ‘false consciousness’. Part of the background to this is something Deleuze says about getting trapped in the other’s dream. Here’s a little instagram introduction to that.
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razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 
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